!Hubzilla DevelopmentI just saw Mike's post about Zot6, denim, zap and vassal. Does that mean that those new apps will replace hubzilla in terms of priority, development etc (i read zot6 will be backported to hubzilla which usually suggest that thats the case)?Or at least shift the focus to those new apps instead of hubzilla? Is there a point to actively work and improve on hubzilla and promote it if in few weeks/months we might be switching to new thing?

Don't worry. Hubzilla will be around...All upstream projects of mike share the same codebase. zot/6 is the new version of the zot protocol which powers hubzilla now. This will be implemented in hubzilla later this year.

>i mean its in a way cool and i understand it. mike is basically building nomadic ecosystem on his own which noone else seems to be doing (most of the fediverse focus went into activitypub). and once the software reaches some form of stability and a community around it, he moves on to build another piece of the puzzle. i just want to know where we are and how much time we have

Hubzilla's future (much like the fate of your livestock) depends on you. I provide a range of different types of feedstock, but the decision is ultimately yours as to which feedstock is best for the needs of your animals. If you give a thoroughbred stallion rye, he'll starve and die. If you give a pony alfalfa he'll founder and die.

Mike dont get me wrong, I admire your work and the decision to branch out as well. Didnt want to make you irritated, or sound like a person who has any demands towards the developers. Afterall (and I agree) its your padlock. But since a lot of feeding I order from you, I wanted to have more insite whether food supply for my ponies will still keep on coming as frequent and best quality or not. Also, especially that we just started growing ponies here, if your barley looks like it can attract more farmers, and customers to our shared market, I thought I would ask for some more details so we can check and decide. Since we have just joined in maybe moving now to barley farming is better then keep growing rye for ponies, noone will want in near future.

I´m not a developer – i´m just watching the game. To me it seams that for some reasons just few developers are jumping on the hubzilla train, and I guess you need more than few developers to make an app really successful and attractive. Maybe Mike is still looking for new ways to promote his ideas and work so that more other developer catch fire.

And ye shall hear of forks and rumours of forks: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet.

The best answer I can give you is that Hubzilla is an open source project that is built and maintained by an open source community. Its future and relevance will ultimately be determined by the collective efforts of that community.

I try to offer guidance since I know large sections of the code intimately, but my personal involvement should not be required. If it is, the community has failed in its role as a software collective and the long-term viability of the software would probably be in doubt.

I've been working on this code base for a very long time and often get blamed personally for every short-coming, flaw or lack of comprehension; even for code that was contributed by others. This puts me under tremendous pressure. I'm somewhat older in comparison with many people in this space and the constant pressure and hositility that I face every day for the crime of trying to provide ethical and useful software has had serious effects on my physical health. Something has to give.

My solution to this constant pressure was to distance myself from the project. You'll note that I'm still here - communicating through a project fork that split off over a year ago. The repositories are closely linked so that I can still fix Hubzilla bugs and they'll find their way into the project; and Hubzilla enhancements flow back to my repository.

BUT - there are other forks and several are not so closely linked. Some of them have diverged to the point where the merge conflicts can no longer be reconciled. So they are now off on their own. Zap and denim are examples of this. They are evolving separately and it is possible they will split off into different software communities. I'm not trying to manage this process and I cannot change their course. These things all have a life and destiny of their own. I am on a mission that you may not agree with or even understand. Meanwhile I still have a lot of work to do and a shrinking amount of time to do it. How you personally deal with this reality isn't my concern. If you believe in Hubzilla and what it represents and wish to help that community, therein lies your answer. If not, your destiny may lie elsewhere.

The number of projects in this space is about to go exponential - even if you ignore my own contributions. Many will fail. The survivors will have one thing in common - a community that cares and gets involved.

One thing I will try and do sooner rather than later is merge all the infrastructure changes to apps and settings and addons. Getting rid of features and techlevels and addon settings is one of the most brilliant UX changes we've seen in years. It will take some time to convert them to apps (I just turned everything off for now and then converted the top 10 features/addons), but that's something Hubzilla folks can get started on and it isn't technically difficult and I believe will have a huge payoff.

Not sure I understand correctly. You mean turn all the extra features etc. into apps? That would be interesting. We could implement something like apps.nextcloud.com where users could enable/disable apps (similar to what it is now but with more explanations etc).

Hubzilla is a platform and develop could code for that platform all kind of things... I mean it should work like it did for other cms systems as well... all this plugins that come up after a while for WP... But for some reasons this does not happen for Hubzilla.... Now the new apps of Mike might be an other try to spread the best parts of Hubzilla out in the world again - in the hope this new apps catch fire among developers.

I've brought all the recent addon/app work to the red/hubzilla tree. I will also try to (where possible) get some of the Zot6 code moved over so that it can start to be integrated. There are some major unresolvable conflicts - most notably Daemon/Notifier; but I'll do what I can to keep Hubzilla moving forward and not let it lag.

Nothing graphical yet. Basically when clicking an app in the "app store" you will see a description of the app. If an app is already installed and you click it, it will take you to the app settings.It is not very clear yet which features will qualify as an app and which should remain a feature.

Some people are under the impression that if a project creator goes on to do other things that it bodes ill will for the project.

It *does* occasionally mean that development resources will be divided or limited until the project regains a critical mass of developers to push it forward; but most open source projects survive this kind of event.

The Friendica project creator (in this case myself) actually abandoned Friendica as I saw very little long-term hope for the project when we lost federation with Facebook and Twitter, and after Google shut down its federating services to push G+, and Diaspora basically told us to go away and leave them alone; and Status.Net was also abandoned by its creator as he went on to push pump.io. This was six years ago - and it didn't leave a lot to federate with. Some of the Friendica folks decided to keep it alive and have managed quite an impressive comeback from those dark days of 2012.

Being 'one of the largest open-source teams in the world... in the top 2% of all project teams on Open Hub[1]' that just released another new version of a cutting-edge, state-of-the-art communications platform!

I must admit I read Mike Macgirvin's comment with some skepticism, because I haven't kept up with Friendica, and assumed it was slowly withering. Thanks to @Andy H3 for correcting that image. Impressive!

No, some week ago I again had a look at Friendica and see that it has indeed nicely progressed in it's own way. I am in love with Hubzilla, though but isn't it great that there are so very different solutions? I believe that there are indeed some things we could learn from Friendica. The first and very obvious thing: It's Got The Look. It's beautiful, where I often get feedback that Hubzilla was a very good idea, worked very well for what it sets out to do, but wasn't very well designed on the user frontend side, the typography was off, the overall layout unbalanced ... I am no designer, I am missing the language to back this up, fully understand or argue. I am just the parrot repeating what I was told. But I really had a little "'Wow!" moment when I saw a Friendica instance.Maybe it's the question of appearing more "friendly" on the first impression.But that is also one reason I am really looking forward to the next release. I believe the UI changes for the configs are awesome and will help us a lot. They take a bit of the configuration complexity out of Hubzilla's UI and really are an improvement.